This invention relates generally to computer systems and methods for generating coupons to provide discounts for purchases and, in particular, to delivery techniques for delivering coupons assigned to a particular household. The invention is particularly adapted for delivering targeted coupons to a household. Targeted coupons are coupons which are assigned to a household on the basis of attributes of that household.
Retail establishments, in particular grocery establishments, have attempted to use various technologies to assist in increasing sales at its stores, or retail outlets. One technique is to provide rewards in the form of discounts to regular customers who purchase significant amounts from that chain. This led to a frequent shopper system in which point-of-sale, or checkout, systems are used in conjunction with frequent shopper cards in order to provide instant discounts to customers presenting a frequent shopper card to the cashier. Such frequent shopper card may be bar-coded, wherein the identity of the household possessing the card may be scanned with the bar code scanner used to input purchases to the point-of-sale system. One difficulty with such instant discounts is that they are provided to every customer who presents a frequent shopper card to the cashier. This invites "cherry picking" in which certain customers obtain frequent shopper cards from multiple chains and plan purchases in order to purchase items from each chain which are discounted. Such "cherry picking" reduces the profit margin of the retail establishment, which, particularly for grocery establishments, tends to be low to begin with.
In order to discourage such "cherry picking," computer systems have been developed which take the discounting function away from the point-of-sale system, which is inflexible and must provide discounts to all parties possessing a frequent shopper card and, instead, utilize information obtained by the point-of-sale system in order to target coupons to particular households. In one such system, households are divided into clusters, such as deciles, according to the amount of purchases made by each household in a given period of time. Thus, infrequent shoppers would fall in the first decile, more frequent shoppers in the second decile, and the like, with shoppers doing the heaviest purchasing falling in the tenth decile. The targeting system then assigns coupons to particular households based upon the cluster, or deciles, in which that particular household is situated. In this manner, all households in a particular cluster, or decile, are assigned the same coupons. However, households in one decile may be assigned coupons different from households in a different decile. Each coupon assigned to a household represents a negative price or "cents off" value. A print file is generated by the targeting system and forwarded by the retail establishment to a commercial printer. The commercial printer prints, folds, and mails to each household the coupons assigned to that household based upon the output print file of the targeting system. Each of the coupons typically includes a bar code, or other coding technique, which is scanned at the point-of-sale system and provides a pointer to a location in a product lookup (PLU) table. The PLU table contains a listing of negative prices, or discounts, which are applied to the total purchase when the coupon is redeemed. The targeted coupon typically includes a text field made up of, for example, three lines of text, which describes an offer statement for that coupon. The offer statement may be, for example, a number of cents off of a particular item, buy-one get-one free, $5 off of $50 of purchases, and the like. In addition to the offer statement, the text field includes any information with respect to an expiration date of the coupon. As a result, substantially the entire text field is typically devoted to describing the offer statement and expiration information. Any additional information must be squeezed into any remaining portions of the text field that are not used by the offer statement and expiration information.
The targeted coupon print file is typically sent by the retail establishment to the commercial printer periodically, such as every month, every two months, or the like. All of the targeted coupons assigned to a household are printed on sheets, with multiple coupons on a sheet. Therefore, the number of coupons assigned to each household is fixed. Once the coupons are printed, folded, and inserted in an envelope, the coupons are mailed typically utilizing bulk mail rates. The printing and mailing process is relatively expensive. Therefore, it is typical for the retail establishment to exclude all but the highest level clusters, or deciles, from the system. Therefore, infrequent shoppers are not mailed coupons. The households which do receive coupons may receive them up to approximately two (2) weeks after printing because of the delays inherent in bulk rate tariffs.
Such mailed targeted coupon system has many drawbacks. In addition to the high costs, which limit the number of frequent shoppers who receive coupons, the delay in the cycle between assigning coupons to households and the receipt of those coupons in the mail by the households, often results in the coupons either already being expired when they arrive or the merchandise discounted by the coupons no longer being available from the manufacturer resulting in the necessity to hand out rain checks. The coupons are often delivered to households on vacation or who have changed addresses, resulting in wasted production and mailing costs, as well as the creation of additional junk mail which must be discarded. The lengthy planning cycle of assigning coupons to households and printing and mail delivery of the coupons to the households precludes responding to any fast changes in market conditions. Furthermore, receipt of the coupons in the mail greatly diminishes any impulse-buying because of delay between the time the household receives the coupons and the next shopping trip to the issuing retail establishment.
Although the mailing of targeted coupons to a household could provide the opportunity for directing specific information to the household, the mailed targeted coupon packets are not utilized for that purpose. Because of the excessively long planning cycle, it is not feasible to utilize mailed targeted coupon packets to inform the households of information which changes frequently. They additionally do not provide an opportunity for dialog with customers of the retail establishment. Furthermore, customers get coupons without requesting them, which may further reduce the impact that the coupons have on the purchasing habits of the household.
Retail establishments, such as grocery stores, often develop promotional campaigns designed to encourage increased purchases among its frequent shopper members. An example of such a campaign is a program which gives away a valuable item, such as a turkey or ham, to a frequent shopper member who purchases a given amount of merchandise within a predefined period of time. While such campaign has proven successful at increasing purchases by frequent shoppers, it can create administrative difficulties. One difficulty is that members desire to keep track of their qualifying accumulated purchases in order to gauge how much additional purchases must be made to qualify for the prize. This desire for information increases as the cutoff date for the qualifying period approaches. In order to learn their accumulated purchase value, households tend to approach the customer service counter resulting in an increased distraction to customer service personnel, especially as the campaign deadline approaches.